Electronic storage devices that respectively employ a memory subsystem that includes memory devices or modules that use non-volatile memory cells are commonly known and are sometimes referred to as solid-state storage devices. The computer device industry has increased the adoption of these solid-state storage devices due to certain advantages offered by these types of storage devices over other forms of storage devices, such as rotational drives. The adoption of solid state storage devices as enhancement or even a replacement to rotational drives is not without some difficulty because many conventional computer devices, sometimes referred to as “hosts”, use host operating systems, file systems, or both that are optimized for use with rotational drives rather than solid state storage devices. For example, unlike rotational drives, solid state storage devices that use NAND flash memory devices, also referred to as “flash drives”, suffer from write limitations because these devices require an erase cycle before a write cycle can be performed on or within a flash block of a flash memory device. Currently, flash block can only support a limited number of erase cycles and after an approximate number of these erase cycles are performed on a flash block, the flash block will eventually be unable to store data in the flash block in a reliable manner. For instance, data stored in a flash block that is at or near its erase cycle limit may start exhibiting bit errors which will progressively increase in size until this data can no longer be reliably read from the flash block.
To reduce erase cycles, one traditional solution is to use wear-leveling but this does not actually reduce or minimize erase cycles. Instead, wear-leveling simply spreads out erase cycles by re-mapping writes from one flash block to another flash block. Another solution is to employ a write-in-place technique but this suffers from the disadvantage of increasing erase-cycles in embodiments that use control blocks.
Consequently, a need exists for reducing erase cycles in electronic storage devices, such as solid-state storage devices, that use erase-limited memory devices.